Barco India moving from ‘controlling’ to ‘connecting’

Employees are the biggest asset for a company, and employee relations is growing in importance with the new generation joining the workforce. Many industries are already feeling the disruption of technology and Gen Z. Though a handful of organisations are close to understanding and adapting to all these disruptions, one thing is pretty much clear to everyone — Maintaining employee relations will get more challenging for all companies in the coming years.

It will be essential for HR to identify the areas in which it can align the business with employee engagement and other activities in the HR function. Today, we are going to talk about an electrical manufacturing company, Barco India, which truly believes that employees are its biggest asset.

For Barco India, fun and team work go hand in hand. To ensure that the employees give their best, it is necessary to bring the best out of them.

Talking to HRKatha, Jayati Roy, director-HR, Barco India, shares how the Company has been making efforts to keep employees as its very first priority. To keep its employees engaged and build a culture of inclusion and team work, Barco India has a group called, Committee of Engagement Champions, which plans and organises all the engagement programmes at Barco India.

“Unlike other organisations, where HR is the custodian of all the engagement activities at the organisation, here a team of employees organises all the activities — events, celebrations and fun programmes. It is a classic example of team work at Barco India,” says Roy.

The programmes range from sports, and celebration of festivals to CSR activities. The committee comprises cross-functional employees as they can offer multiple inputs, which in itself promotes inclusiveness and team work. Sports activities are also organised, such as cricket and table tennis. As Roy shares with HRKatha, one of the activities, a treasure hunt, witnesses blue-collar and white-collar employees participating together to solve puzzles, which encourages bonding and team work at the workplace.

Jayati Roy

“Unlike other organisations, where HR is the custodian of all the engagement activities at the organisation, here a team of employees organises all the activities — events, celebrations and fun programmes. It is a classic example of team work at Barco India”

Keeping in mind the need for lifestyle development as well as women’s safety within and outside work, Barco also provides self-defence training to its women employees. This is to ensure that they are capable of protecting themselves.

The Company’s Barco University provides a basic compliance training to the newcomers to make them understand the niche products that the Company offers. Under its corporate and leadership training, selected people from across the organisation are put through a short MBA programme, where they learn new strategies. After that, one mentor is provided to them from the senior leadership level and they are given the opportunity to work on various assignments.

Barco also believes in upskilling its employees to make them future ready. As part of its endeavour to make a mark in the software and tech industry, Barco India is making efforts to upskill its employees in future-relevant skills, such as IoT, cloud and UX designing. Recently, it organised a hackathon for the first time, which witnessed overwhelming participation. The event also enabled the Company to hire some employees at the entry level as well as in senior roles.

Roy shared an interesting experience involving an autistic employee working at the headquarters. The employee was part of a team working on a global assignment. It was getting very difficult for the team members to establish positive relations with the employee. Seeing this situation, the Company tried to help the employee diagnose her condition of autism. It also attempted to sensitise the team members of that employee to help them understand how to treat people suffering from autism.

“This was the first time I saw a Company taking the issue of employee sustainability so seriously,” mentions Roy.

Considering the initiatives and efforts of the Company to build a strong culture of ‘one team’, it is not surprising that Barco was recognised as a Great Place to Work in India.

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